Entry Point

The player's way into an Alternate Reality Game. This is typically a reference within some other work which somehow distinguishes itself in a way that makes potential players go looking for more. Also referred to as a Rabbit Hole, after the rabbit hole that led to the Alice in Wonderland adventures.

Examples of Entry Point include:

Film

• The entry point for The Beast was Jeanine Salla, a name which appeared in red in the credits of AI commercials. Googling the name would yield the first site in the game.

Live Action TV

• Two of the Alternate Reality sites for the new Doctor Who are simply shown on-screen: Clive's webpage in "Rose", and the UNIT webpage in "World War Three".
• The entry point for The Lost Experience was a TV commercial that aired during Lost, advertising the Hanso Foundation and giving the phone number to call that led to the first few clues.

Music

• The entry point for the Nine Inch Nails ARG, surrounding their Year Zero;;, is a number of USB drives left at concerts with intriguing data. Some contain web addresses to pages from the dystopian future, some contain distorted audio that cause spectrographs to produce simple pictures.

Video Games

• Halo fans who had participated in alternate reality games before were sent plastic bears full of honey, with nine letters that spelled I Love Bees when unscrambled, leading to the website ilovebees.com. The link also flashed during ads for Halo 2 during screenings of I Robot.

Games

• For their Gleemax ARG, Wizards of the Coast mailed plastic brains labelled "moctodsdraziwtaxameelg" ("[e-mail]" backwards) to people who played more than one of their games